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Two perfectly straight streets intersecting like the blessed cross, which form four roads, culminating at the four gates, mystically revealing the marvelously innate grace of the Great King, who, through the four evangelists, showed the twin law of the old and new testaments to be completed through the mystery of the holy cross. ¹

With these potent words Lucian describes the form of the city of Chester. The passage offers, unusually, an idea of how one medieval inhabitant saw the urban landscape around them. Far from streets being simply conduits of traffic, trade and commerce, in Lucian’s mind they are a sign of Christ’s omnipresence. Lucian describes their form not from the level of the street however, as might a citizen or merchant going about their daily business, but more as if viewing the streets from above, on high, looking down upon their overall form. His downwards gaze takes in the entire length of the city’s main streets, each culminating at the four gates, and thus the whole of the intra-mural city. At the time when Lucian was writing the only bodily means of achieving such an overall aerial perspective on a city was by looking down from a tall building, such as the church tower of St Werburgh’s. As an incumbent of St Werburgh’s Abbey, Lucian certainly would have had access to such a vantage point, but De Laude Cestrie is overtly allegorical and reflects Lucian’s meditations on the city through both the lens of Holy Scripture and doctrine as well as his own urban experiences as an inhabitant of Chester. As such, his elevated and all-encompassing view of the city’s form probably owes more to his personal contemplation – that is, Lucian is imagining he is looking down upon the city and, in so doing, seeing its form mystically revealing the marvelously innate grace of the Great King.

Through Lucian’s particularly evocative reading of Chester’s urban landscape, then, De Laude Cestrie provides a rare glimpse into how medieval urban forms were seen and understood by contemporaries. It affords us an opportunity to look at the physical layout of a city through medieval eyes that saw Christian meanings traced out through the shapes and patterns of its streets. Indeed, the morphology of Chester’s plan that Lucian seizes upon – its cross of streets – is a recurring motif in medieval representations of other cities too, both textual and visual. It can be seen, for example, in a late-medieval depiction of Bristol which appears in a mayoral register, Robert Ricart’s Kalendar, and placed at the book’s beginning where the city’s distant and mythical foundation by King Brennius is described. ² As at Chester, Bristol’s medieval intra-mural urban layout was also based upon a cross-plan, each street ending with a gate, and with the High Cross placed at their intersection. As with Lucian’s description of Chester, too, Ricart’s image of Bristol stylizes the city’s form, emphasizing primarily the cross of streets and their respective four gates. Their shared imagined urban forms relate, of course, to the local pattern of streets that existed on the ground, but in Christian minds it also invoked an archetype, the holiest of all cities, Jerusalem. In scripture, the form of Jerusalem is described as ‘four-square’, most notably in the Book of Revelation, with gates on each side, and this gets repeated in numerous medieval depictions of the heavenly Jerusalem. ³ With their shared cross-plans the analogous forms of earthly cities such as Chester and Bristol were morphologically and symbolically linked to Jerusalem, and thus to Christ. In reflecting on Chester’s form what Lucian is doing is making this connection explicit.

As well as perceiving the overall cross-shaped form of Chester’s streets, Lucian also comments on their straightness. This might surprise those who know the streets today, and even in Lucian’s time the city’s two main axial streets were by no means perfectly straight (as our digital maps of medieval Chester clearly reveal). Lucian’s straightening up of Chester’s streets is metaphorical, therefore, and another indication of his allegorical reading of the city’s form. Their straightening by Lucian echo references in both the Old and New Testament where the faithful are instructed to ‘make straight in the desert a highway for our God’ (Isaiah 41:3) and ‘make straight paths for your feet’ (Hebrews 12:13). The streets of Chester were actually laid-out some three centuries or more before Lucian composed De Laude Cestrie, perhaps in Æthelflæda’s time when the burh was established as a Mercian stronghold. ⁴ Its cross-plan of streets is comparatively common as a form for Anglo-Saxon burhs, including those established de novo and not just those that reused earlier Roman sites. ⁵ Chester’s streets were positioned according to where gateways stood in the burh’s defences, and not necessarily following precisely the city’s antecedent Roman street-plan. With Lucian’s words in mind, the possibility exists that the cross-plans of such burhs were deliberately conceived in imitation of the holy city, reflecting not only its four-square layout but also a desire for having straightness in form. There are of course no written accounts of how and why burhs such as Chester were given this particular shape, but Lucian’s thoughts might provide a clue: in describing Chester’s main streets as straight – straighter than they were on the ground – he seeks to connect the city, through its form, to Christian doctrine and belief. Might this also have been in the minds of those who laid out these urban landscapes in the first place? Later Christian authors did draw such symbolic parallels. For example, Hugh of St Victor, writing in the twelfth century, likened exegesis to the act of building and noted how ‘the taut cord shows the path of the true faith’. ⁶ Similarly, in c.1200 Lambert of Ardres describes the setting out of new defences for the town of Ardres by a Master Simon, ‘so learned in geometrical work, pacing with rod in hand, and with all a master's dignity, and setting out hither and thither, not so much with that actual rod as with the spiritual rod of his mind, the work which in imagination he had already conceived.’ ⁷ Theirs and Lucian’s words alert us to not only the perceived symbolism of certain urban forms, but also hint at the symbolic meaning of creating urban landscapes to particular designs.

In describing Chester’s layout Lucian also relates the city’s form to that of the wider world. He does so by noting how Chester aligns with the four cardinal directions, for example in the positions occupied by each of the city’s main gates: ‘Chester has four gates corresponding to the four winds: from the East it looks towards India; from the West towards Ireland; from the North to greater Normandy; from the South to the place where God's severity left the Welsh a narrow corner to punish their innate rebelliousness’. Through its east-west/north-south axes Lucian orientates the city by connecting it to the equally spatially-ordered and orientated world lying beyond the gates and walls. The view he provides is from the inside looking out. This geographical orientating of Chester is used again by Lucian when describing the location of four of the city’s churches; here the passage clearly places the observer at the centre of the city, turning to each cardinal point: ‘For anyone standing in the middle of the marketplace, may turn his face to the east and examine the position of the churches noting John, precursor of the Lord, in the east, Peter the apostle in the west, Werburgh the virgin in the north, and Michael the Archangel in the south. There is nothing truer than this verse: Upon they walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen [Isaiah 62:6]’. Lucian takes the observer through the same particular spatial sequence (that is, east-west/north-south), so again orientating them to Chester’s local topography as well as to the four quarters of the world at large. ⁸ A second related passage shows Lucian reflecting further on the significance of the market’s topographic centrality when he observes ‘how fittingly it is that a marketplace for the selling of things should be placed in the very middle of the city [ie. Chester] where, with an abundance of merchandise, particularly food available, a native or a foreigner may come to buy provisions. Doubtlessly, as with the eternal bread which came from heaven which, according to the prophets, was formed in the centre of the earth [ie. Jerusalem], God wanted to supply all nations of the world equally.’ Here Lucian sees the market’s central location in Chester’s topography (at The Cross) as akin to Jerusalem’s perceived centrality in Christian world-geography, as graphically depicted by mappae mundi of the time. ⁹ Not only does he draw an explicit parallel between Chester and Jerusalem in these two passages therefore, he also connects them both through their shared ‘imagined geographies’. Lucian positions Chester not as a borderland city situated on the geo-political margins of Angevin England but as a pivotal central place like Jerusalem, and like Jerusalem orientated to the cardinal points. In this core-periphery world-view, both are cities situated at the geographical margins of Latin Christendom yet both are also places perceived to lie at the centre, as an axis mundi around which the wider world is both ordered and orientated. ¹⁰

As with the holy city, then, Chester’s imagined and material urban form points literally and metaphorically to the mystery of the holy cross, both as allegory and synecdoche. That Lucian would be thinking about the city in such terms is perhaps not too surprising considering his familiarity with scripture and scholarship in his capacity as a monk of St Werburgh’s. Yet for too long modern historians and geographers have overlooked the significance of his contemplation of Chester’s urban landscape, and the connections it reveals between Christian symbolism and urban form. One of the principal project aims of ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ was to open up access to Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie and in the process help raise awareness about the meanings attached to medieval urban forms. Thanks to Lucian, Chester provides an important exemplar of the ways in which urban landscapes were seen, experienced and understood in the Middle Ages through both their material and imagined symbolic forms.